On (SF) - Adam Roberts ****

This early Adam Roberts novel, is coincidentally, the third SF book in a row that I've read with teen protagonists. Tighe is a teenage boy (he's described as younger because his civilisation uses 20 month years) in a primitive society, inhabiting a strange world where everyone lives on ledges in a vast wall that appears to be thousands of miles high. Primarily by accident, Tighe gets to experience different cultures on the Worldwall, as well as the terrors of war and some evil, oversized insect life. Eventually we (but not he, because he can't grasp it) get to discover what is really happening. I won't give the game away here (though the cover image gives a hint).

There are strong similarities contextually with Christopher Priest's Inverted World. That novel is also set in a location that seems to depend on strange physics - in the case of Priest's world, one where the Earth appears to have taken on a hyperbolic shape and a city has to be moved all the time to avoid spacetime distortion (though these turn out to be probably perceptual alterations, rather than physical ones). I always found it difficult to get my head around what was happening in Inverted World - in On, the setup was considerably clearer, helped by a scientific appendix (though the fictional bits of the 'science' are rather overdone there). The Worldwall is still sometimes something of a struggle to visualise, but was a lot clearer to me than the inverted world.

The reader gets two things out of Roberts' book - the adventure (and, frankly, the rather miserable existence) side of Tighe's life and the gradual discovery of what has really happened and what the Worldwall is. I felt a little bogged down in the middle war section, but the latter parts really lift the book, even if it ends rather abruptly. The clever use of this strange physical environment, particularly when inhabitants take to the air and odd gravitational effects occur, is truly fascinating.

This isn't the best book Roberts has written by any means - it is an early one - but it illustrates, as his books so often do, an enthusiasm for stretching the science fiction genre and doing things with it that challenge the reader's imagination.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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